I’d learned about this last week, and this stuff is a bunch of Wikipedia searches so forgive me if I miss anything :]
Similar to git master and whitelist/blacklist having addressed racist origins, I’ve just learned that “ricing” – i.e. way-far-from-default, colorfully souped-up *nix customizations – came from a derogatory word for Asian “riced out” cars.
(click to enlarge spot where I came to learn about this)
Example in the lemmy.ml/c/linux community.
The linked Wikipedia article doesn’t list *nix ricing specifically, but it’s probably not a far reach – for example, tech’s master-slave came from cars too.
Now I’m not here to start a debate on whether the term itself is bad. The arguments are done to death and predictable (old threadhope I can link here). Rather, I posit that we could probably invent a new term if we forced it hard enough.
For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for “white power”, as a collective prank (Wikipedia).
Further, Tumblr invented 'then beg' as an insult response to 'I beg your pardon/to differ'. (click to enlarge)
Based on Pukicho.
So why can’t Lemmy invent something too?
Here are some earlier takes. (click to enlarge for source, but they are listed below anyway)
I surmise it has to be (1) somewhat unique and (2) short and nounable/verbable.
- Customization doesn’t fit – it’s too broad. Changing the wallpaper is a customization – diagonalizing your screen is a rice (term to be replaced…).
- Bespoke doesn’t fit either. That’s for a duct-tape script you hack together.
- Pimping out… is not a good alternative. It preexists(citation needed?) and has inertia but it’s not any better.
- Souping up… doesn’t roll off the tongue so much. But it’s food-related (and thus not far from “rice”). Though I can’t see myself saying “Yo, check out this epic soup.”
Brainstorming welcome :P
Spice/spiced could work. But it’s still an allusion, not sure if that defeats the point.
For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for “white power”, as a collective prank
Which, outside of specific contexts where you’re already confident someone is a WN, was quickly forgotten and never really took off. It’s not a great example of a social shift.
Is “ricing” not originally related to customised cars from street racing or something? I personally don’t see an issue with it.
The activity itself is quite good for making people aware of how a desktop linux OS is working but doing it excessively is a bit silly so makes sense for jt to have a silly name.
This is a tough one, because to me “ricing” or “riced out” carries additional negative undertones (racism aside). I have always heard it used in a way implying that it was referencing enhancements done in a cheap or gaudy/classless way. Think of the most Razer-like LED adorned gaming PC setup, that could have easily been described as being “riced up”.
I think the phrase “decked out” works OK, and seems to also lack the negative connotation, which may or not be in line with the goal here.
Also, seeing your example ideas you shot down, I am not sure you full understand “souping up” phrase. The term “souped up” has been in use for over a century and I still hear people use it pretty frequently. It is generally meant to imply something has been made faster or more powerful, frequently with cars, and probably why some people argue it is a shortened version of supercharged. I agree that it probably isn’t a good fit here, but not being of how it sounds.
Saw the
.dedomain and my first thought was this was about using a potato ricer to make spätzle. I may not be normal.maybe something derived from dekotora? it has most of the same associations as the term we’re looking to replace while not having racist or pejorative origins. deko?
rizzing?
I’ve always used decked regarding to it.
Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).
Noodles - it’s a mess of dotfiles
I assume you’re joking - this is just a different food/culture/race association.
The idea of suggesting the word “noodles” doesn’t come from a racial point-of-view. I’m using “noodles” to describe the mess of dotfiles, which is like saying “spaghetti code” for poorly written code.
I guess you can argue it has a race association as the only reason we are coming up with a new word is because the old word is racist.
Some people just want to be offended
Can’t people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
Ricing isn’t exactly the same as personalized though.
Ricing when it comes to cars is putting on a giant wing and a huge muffler on a Honda Civic.
Ricing in the Gentoo community is turning on every compiler optimization flag for the main portage config file without knowing what they’re doing, potentially actually de-optimizing your setup.
There’s an element of “overdone” involved usually whenever someone is called a ricer.
Yeah but that’s missing the flair required by people who spend their evenings adjusting the radial blur on the window borders.
We need to make it offensive to white people instead. So colonising.
i don’t think we ought to be implying that colonization is cool.
imo it’s not much more offensive than the term ricing but meh, just a bad joke
“Waltzing”. cool people dance to 3:3
Isn’t it the same as tuning?
Although it’s unclear what tuning is because it depends on who says it:
- It does mean doing modifications to a vehicle for actual performance improvements
- It’s used extensively by ricers to describe themselves and their hobby and they think it’s a positive term
- It’s used extensively by people who dislike ricing and most definitely as a derogatory term
Yet for all its faults, I believe that’s the closest word to ricing you’ll find that is universally understood, neutral and isn’t rendered hopelessly bland and meaningless by the process of political correctness newspeak.
Pocking
Pocked up
I.e. peacocking, making it awesome and flashy and sharing with others
Quick reach a consensus before the yungins start posting rizzed out setups
Decked out? Cranked?
I thought about “decked out”, though then people would say “look at my deck”, potentially creating ambiguity between card games and spiffy desktops.
And extra ambiguity with people talking about polishing their deck while also pronouncing it as dick
I mean there is an overlap between Linux users and those who play card games
I’d like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as card games, is in fact, GNU/card games, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus card games. 😉
I’m shreking up my arch install rn
Sometimes, I Miles Edward O’Brien my VM GPU passthrough.
I’ve Farquaad my network stack!
You’re compensating for something with your network stack?
I just shreked my opensuse
Ebbin my neezerinstall until it scrooges
